dwc

I Forgot

The jackass didn't even apologize for hitting me.

Hit. Again.

Yep, I was hit on my bike again. Luckily I'm not hurt (I managed to keep my balance), and my bike seems okay.

I really hate riding at night (even though I have lights) because I know how hard it is to see. Unfortunately, when you're working from 9:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night (…), there's not much hope of avoiding low visibility conditions.

My coworker (who also bikes) and I often joke about how having one or two close calls is a good day. But I've started to wonder if I'm not being cautious enough.

I think I give drivers WAY too much credit.

Well

I received my "emergency paycheck" today. It turns out that it might be for the wrong pay period, and that they also took out money for a retirement plan that I haven't yet enrolled in. Yeah, I think I'll be holding onto this one until we can be sure everything's kosher.

I'm not supposed to feel

Content Management

D. Keith Robinson recently wrote an article about the process of managing content.

At work, this seems to be a pretty common issue. On the one hand, we've been very successful in the past with giving personal attention to our customers and their sites. On the other hand, some of our clients want more control over their sites (which really means more frequent and involved updates), but don't have the knowledge or time to do so. Oh, did I mention we're understaffed right now?

The Power Grab and Groupthink

Benjamin Mako Hill's recent entry, Law 49: Never Live With Folks Who Buy This Book (via Planet Debian), reminds me a lot of some people I know.

I've always found it interesting that people make greed, distrust, and selfishness so central to their personalities. For them, friendship is just a means to an end; taking advantage of people is the way to get things done. They are very skilled at "staying on the warpath" by ignoring their faults and compartmentalizing their feelings.

In my experience, these people put a lot of faith in groupthink. If one person dislikes a newcomer, everyone does. Individuals who go against the grain are shunned, even when the opposing viewpoint is logical. Safety in numbers, I guess.

I'll never forget when one of them told me the following: "Truthfully, you'll always be an outsider."

Clever got me this far
Then tricky got me in

Paychecks in the 21st Century

When I was hired to a full-time position on November 5, I expected there to be some delay before myUFL figured it out.

Two weeks later, myUFL still lists me as an OPS employee. Apparently, my notice of appointment was "lost in the system" somwhere. No one really knows if I'm getting a paycheck next week.

Seriously.

opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user

Yep, when NTLMv2 authentication is forced, no clients are able to connect. Not even smbclient on Linux, which can successfully connect via NTLM authentication. Fun!

Exotic fish will never be able to walk
As long as we live

Frustration

Apple can't reproduce the problem, so I have more debugging to do. I'm going to try tracking down another license of Windows XP Professional to do a clean install (I love VMware, by the way) that is not part of our Windows domain. It shouldn't matter, though, because I thought I tried connecting to the Mac using smbclient with NTLMv2 authentication and having the same problem.

I really don't want it to come to this, but the source IS open. I could always try debugging the opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user method. And as a last resort, there's always Ethereal and tcpdump.

In other work-related news, I'm going to new employee orientation tomorrow from 8:30 to noon. I've been a little overwhelmed by the process of signing up for benefits - I feel like I'm lacking the information necessary to make the best choices - so hopefully this training will fill in some of the gaps.

What kind of fool am I

Dodging Cars

There are some days which make me fear biking. Today, I came mere inches from getting hit by a car not once, not twice, but three times.

First time: Biking to campus, waiting for the light to turn. Some guy in a PT Cruiser waits for the light to turn green, THEN decides to turn right, even though no one was turning left from the other direction for over a minute. Yes, right turns on red were allowed at the intersection. Yes, he saw me.

Second time: Biking home from campus, another damn PT Cruiser decides to turn right in front of me. If you're going to turn in front of someone, DON'T HESITATE. It makes it look like you are yielding right of way.

Third time: Immediately after the PT Cruiser passed some Civic tries the same thing. I have to go AROUND TO THE DRIVER'S SIDE, into oncoming traffic (luckily no one was coming), to avoid getting creamed.

It's strange. I go days - even weeks - without having any problems on my bike. Then one day, it seems like every driver stops paying attention to me.

I'm sorry, but the next time I get hit by one of you idiots, I'm calling the cops with your license plate number even if I'm okay. In the meantime, I'm just gonna start kicking your car if you do this kind of crap.

On the train, I lost my intelligence

His and Her Circumstances

Suresh recommended "His and Her Circumstances" to me recently, so I've been renting the DVDs from Netflix. I've been really enjoying it, though it was a little strange at first.

How to Annoy Me

1. Drive a red Ford Explorer, cut me off, slam on your breaks, and act surprised when I lay on the horn and flip you off.
2. Send an "urgent update", send it again ten minutes later, and send it a third time ten minutes after that. Then, half an hour later, realize you sent the wrong version of the file and ask me to do the update all over again.
3. Edit files that will be pushed to production, possibly by anyone in the office, without testing them. If you need to make changes that might break things, do it on a separate file until you're sure it works.
4. Type "could of" when you mean "could've".

She'd melt away if only she could've

Mac OS X vs. Samba, Round 4

I finally got sick of the whole issue, and filed a bug report with Apple. I'm not really sure what to expect from them. I've debugged the problem and isolated it to a specific function (and further verified that a stock Samba installation does not exhibit the problem when NTLMv2 authentication is forced), so I hope the report will be taken seriously.

Now that I think about it, I should add an UPSTREAM resolution to my Bugzilla. :-)

How to Annoy Me

Act like you're going to choose the left side of the sidewalk (the WRONG SIDE), then change your mind at the last minute, so I have to swerve to miss you. At least you had a light, asshole.

Mac OS X vs. Samba, Round 3

I come back to this problem every so often, but never work on it for very long because it's so frustrating. Finally, I've isolated the problem to NTLMv2 authentication in Mac OS X's version of Samba. (Round 1, Round 2)

After updating to 10.3.6, I decided to try connecting again, since the notice claimed "improved file sharing for … PC (SMB/CIFS)". From the Windows side, everything looked the same: Windows tries passing domain authentication (a few dozen times, according to the logs). After giving up, it presents a password dialog. You enter the username and password of the Mac OS X account, which are rejected.

Maybe I missed it in the logs last time, but this whole process spit out a pretty informative message (at log level = 1) this time around:

[2004/11/08 09:48:22, 1] auth_ods.c:opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user(312)
  User "dwc" failed to authenticate with "dsAuthMethodStandard:dsAuthNodeNTLMv2" (-14091) :(

There are server options to disable the weaker LANMAN and NTLM authentication methods, but not the NTLMv2 method (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong). You can force NTLMv2 authentication on the server side by saying:

lanman auth = no
ntlm auth = no

When I restarted smbd with these options, all clients were denied access, even clients that could connect before, with the same error in the logs. So the Windows clients just happened to expose a problem with NTLMv2 authentication (due to their LMCompatibilityLevel, NTLMv2 is preferred). I either missed this fact because I wasn't reading the logs closely enough, or it wasn't being logged in any useful manner until the 10.3.6 update.

Once again, I'm sort of stuck. At this point, I know the problem lies in the opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user method, but I'm not sure I know how to fix it. I'd like to finally close this issue, but I still have some research and testing ahead.

If you're having similar problems, you might want to read a paper by one of the Samba developers from a USENIX conference in 2000. It discusses some of the registry values which control the authentication; if you have access to regedit (I don't), you may be able to solve the problem fairly easily. (The server NTLMv2 option referenced in that paper does not work on Mac OS X's version of Samba.)

All my world in one grain of sand
And I've blown it

Formal Introductions

This isn't something I normally think about, but when it comes up I get annoyed.

You're out with a friend; let's call him or her Person A. Another friend, coworker, or acquaintance of yours walks by; let's call him or her Person B. You start talking with Person B without introducing Persons A and B.

I don't know what it is, but a simple introduction makes the difference between Persons A and B standing there feeling awkward and Persons A and B being comfortable with talking.

There are two reasons why you might not introduce Persons A and B:

1. Persons A and B might have met 6 months ago.
2. You think Persons A and B would have no interest in talking.

I think that, as a rule, you should introduce people at least twice. The first time, you can provide a formal introduction: "Person B, this is Person A. He's my friend from high school." The second time, you can say: "Oh, Person B, do you know Person A?" Making sure Persons A and B know each other the second time breaks the ice again and removes any uncertainty Persons A or B might have about who the other is.

Not introducing Persons A and B because you think they would have no interest in talking, or because "they won't ever see each other again" is pretty rude. While it may be true that Persons A and B will never see each other again, it never hurts to introduce them once.

Having said all that, I admit that I'm not great at introducing people. But I'm becoming more aware of the problem, and that's the first step...

Dreams and belief have gone

asshole.jpg

It will probably be changed shortly, but check out the filename of the Bush image on Netscape's election page.

Cycling Etiquette

Just because I have lights on my bike and you don't, that doesn't make it okay to tailgate me all the way from campus to my neighborhood. What if I have to stop suddenly because some driver feels like being a moron? I don't like the odds of you stopping in time when there's only a meter or so between us. And don't feed me some line about how you would have passed me given the opportunity; the sidewalks are very wide on this route, not to mention the nice grass on either side.

Wikis

I've started to use a Wiki at work for internal documentation. We originally installed PhpWiki about 18 months ago, but it never caught on. I migrated the few pages we had over to MoinMoin because its default configuration seemed a little nicer.

At first, I didn't really see the point. But it turns out that a Wiki is a great fit for our internal documentation. It formats everything nicely without much thought, tracks changes automatically (though it would be really cool if it were integrated with our CVS), and allows anyone in our group to follow along and make changes. I don't think a Wiki is the answer for everything, but it is kinda cool.

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Finished William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive this morning. I enjoyed it very much. It has four different protagonists, which was a little overwhelming at times. I found myself flipping back to remind myself about previous events.

Also, it turns out I did things out of order: I read Neuromancer last year, I think. But I should have read Count Zero before this one. :-/

Headlines...in Flash?

It sort of caught me by surprise, but there's apparently a lot of people using Flash for headlines these days - ESPN, ABC News, Movies.com, and probably others.

I won't go into the history of this technique, but if you're curious, you can read more about it from Mike Davidson. He also has a demonstration of the technique.

I understand the desire to incorporate more typefaces into your site to enrich the Web experience, but I fear that this method is too easy to drop in to an existing site and that people will do so without considering all of the consequences. Most importantly, the site designer and ONLY the site designer has control over the fonts being used, the colors of the text, and the size of the headline.

There also appear to be a few bugs in the display of these headlines, at least on Linux (Flash player 6.0.81). The background of each headline is bright green, as though they are transparent GIF images that have had a few bits flipped. Sometimes the headlines don't even appear (as on ESPN's Web site). On the ABC News site, there is some seriously strange JavaScript weirdness.

I've never particularly liked Flash, and this might push me over the edge. (Well, that and the advertisements.) It has its uses, certainly, but there are few instances in recent memory where Flash has added to my experience on a Web site.

This is partly due to the fact that Macromedia's support of Linux has always been a little half-assed. There was a time when we were a full major version behind (we were stuck with version 5 for a while after version 6 came out), and audio/video sync has always been somewhat off - but to Macromedia's credit, it is getting better. (It makes sense for them to produce a decent version of Flash for Linux, since developers will be less resistant to using the technology when working side-by-side with Web designers.)

Time to install the FlashBlock plugin, I guess.

Sprinkles

We called them "sprinkles" when I was growing up, but apparently some people call them "jimmies". These people are INSANE.

Little did I know there are EVEN MORE INSANE people in this world who call them "hundreds and thousands".

Jakarta Project

I'm doing some research at work today. I've started by trying to get a feel for what the Apache Jakarta Project has available in the space.

The Jakarta Project seems to have a hard time describing their products without resorting to marketing language and buzzwords. Take, for example, HiveMind:

HiveMind is a services and configuration microkernel:

• Services: HiveMind services are POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) that can be easily accessed and combined. Each service defines a Java interface it implements. HiveMind takes care of instantiating and configuring each service just as necessary. HiveMind lets services collaborate with each other via dependency injection.

[...]

Much of the terminology is so generic that the projects blend together in my mind. There are too many frameworks, too many general-purpose engines. If you want developers to use your products, you must provide specific information on them. "A general-purpose blah blah blah XML blah blah blah framework" is NOT helpful.

I apologize for picking on the Jakarta Project and its products (I'm NOT picking on its members; please don't take this personally), but this is VERY frustrating. I'm sure there's a lot of great technology available from the Jakarta Project, but I sure can't find it.